Infinite Us

by Eden Butler

  “I doubt that.” She made more sense than I let on. Still wasn’t sure what about this woman kept me weak, kept me sprung and stupid on a female I didn’t even know. But still, I was immobilized, struck dumb and still by her commanding voice and the bossy way she made me get into shit I just couldn’t believe in.

  Like the temple rub. The aura cleanse hadn’t worked. Now Willow was trying massage and meditation. But no way I was gonna let her try “sonic meditation.” Beautiful girl or not, she was not going to touch my stereo—Hippie-Monk-Chanting mess would come through those speakers.

  “I should have never opened the door.”

  “Please. You couldn’t resist.”

  She paused in the temple massage when I laughed, shaking my head as though I didn’t appreciate the small jab. “I’m a baller. I can resist anything.”

  “No, Nash. You’re a computer geek with insomnia.”

  I cracked open an eye, frowning with my nostrils flaring, wondering if she’d been checking up on me. But she just smirked and jerked her chin at the wall, right where my framed MIT diploma in Computer Science hung, telling her all she thought she needed to know about me and my baller status. “You are not invulnerable to my temptations.”

  I couldn’t deny that. She came right in and I didn’t stop her. She bossed me around like I was her willing bitch and I hadn’t really complained. Still, I wasn’t going to cop to that. “So you say.”

  “Hush.” She held my head still, laying the pads of her thumbs over my eyelids. “Be still and concentrate…”

  “Not gonna work…”

  “And visualize a dark room.” Her voice was low, but calm. It had taken on a deeper pitch, something that reminded me of an old-school club with cigarette smoke hanging like a halo in the air above a small stage. You give Willow something black and tight to wear and I bet all the cash in my Make It Rain savings account that she’d pull off the part of sexy as fuck jazz singer, easy.

  “There is no light. No noise. There is only the vastness of space, starless, soundless.” As she spoke it, my mind went gray. There was a lull, the small, silent hum of nothingness you always hear when you slip between asleep and awake. ‘Tween place, as my old Creole gramps used to call it.

  Willow got me there quickly. It was less difficult than I thought it would be. For all my protests, this crazy white chick had my mind doing the ‘Tween hum. The smell of her, that soft touch, her calm voice, so easily pulled me right to the edge of oblivion. “You are alone in that darkness and your body is weightless. You are floating. Breathe. Keep breathing in and out. In through your nose, out through your mouth. One, two, three…”

  “Not…not working.” Fighting was useless. I knew it, but was too much of a hardass to admit that aloud. Especially not to Willow.

  “Shh. Keep floating. You are light and free. There is nothing around you. Only space and the infinite expanse…you are floating… free…

  Willow’s voice faded until it didn’t sound like her at all. I gave up resisting and followed her lead, letting the image of the darkness consume me. There was nothing for me to see, no real images that came together from form and shape to make something real. It was a place I’d never been—in this silence, in the space where there was nothing. Something about Willow had put me there and the harder I concentrated, the fainter her voice became. I floated then, imaging things that could not be real, things that seemed so usual, so familiar.

  “Listen to my voice…”

  I did. I listened so closely, so intently that after several minutes, I could not hear Willow at all.

  I heard nothing—not her sultry tone, not my own breathing, not even the traffic from the street below. Everything faded to silence.

  Until there were other sounds; sounds that I couldn’t make out at first. Sounds that had me shaking, had Willow’s grip shifting from my forehead, traveling to hold my fingers tight.

  “Nash?” she asked and I knew it was because she was worried. But her worry was the last thing on my mind.

  There, in the center of my living room, a woman I didn’t know held my hand and rubbed my temples until her voice became a distant echo as I slipped away into sleep.

  Behind that sleep and the fainting feel of her touch, I left Brooklyn.

  Then, the dream took me.

  New Orleans

  For starters, no one had been able to drink hooch for going on seven years. Mama said that’s where all the bad came from—bossy government people telling folk they couldn’t have a drop to drink. Those meddling politicians called it “Prohibition.” My Uncle Aron and his smart mouth self liked to call it “Proha-bullshit.” Anyway, the whole mess made people angry and angry people did angry things. That’s why Mama said to stay clear of Ripper Dell and those bad-seed boys. Never mind that Ripper got paid by every fool who ran a hustle on Rampart Street, my mama included. He had money and men with money got whatever they wanted; even fifteen-year-old girls like me. But, I did what Mama said because if I didn’t, she’d whip my behind until it was redder than the wattle of Mimi Bastien’s rooster.

  I wanted to be out at Bastie’s swamp farm today, not running hooch between the corners where the white policemen kept their eyes tight on anyone that hadn’t paid them their fair share of ‘hush now’ money. Mama said between Ripper Dell and those fat policemen, we’d be lucky to eat come the rest of the month. It was another excuse she gave to that cat-eyed old priest during confession. “I got to feed my babies. Hooch makes that happen, Father.”

  Last Thursday, I’d sat in the pew next to the confessional as Mama spilled away the sins she’d racked up for a week, since she last time brought me and my stupid brother Sylv to St. Augustine’s to get our souls right and sort out our sassy mouths. At least, that’s what she called it.

  She and her good friend Lulu Davenport made the hooch from an old recipe some crop sharer woman had given Bastie when they still lived back in Atlanta. That crop sharer lady had gotten the recipe from her daddy, a poor hillbilly who died in the middle of a gunfight somewhere up in the Appalachian Mountains. Bastie fed the woman, gave her a place to stay in Atlanta because she’d married Bastie’s cousin, and family was family, after all, at least to Bastie's folk. That share cropper lady’d been a redneck’s daughter and married to a black man which was two strikes against her so no white people in Atlanta would lift a finger for her. So to thank Bastie, she gave my Mimi the only thing in her power to give—the recipe to make good, strong hooch.

  Bastie wouldn’t help my mama with making it, not with the policemen greedy to do anything bad to folk who they thought wouldn’t hand out that ‘hush now’ money, but she gave Mama the recipe and now Mama and Lulu paid Ripper Dell to keep them safe and paid the white policemen to look the other way.

  No one was supposed to drink hooch. So said the law. But that didn’t stop a damn person from doing it. Not in New Orleans. Sure not on Rampart Street.

  “Sookie! Get your skinny backside over to Miss Matthews. She’s waiting.”

  Mama was in a bad way today. It was only the end of March and already hotter than the devil’s tongue and the humidity around the city, seem like around the world, was like taking a big ole breath, holding inside your lungs right before you jump into the cold, deep water. It felt like something was coming and it was something nobody wanted showing up.

  “Sookie, right damn now!” Her voice was loud, mean as all get out and I moved through the back kitchen of my mama’s small bakery, pushing the Johnson kids out my way as Esther and Robbie, who cleaned the building for food, fussed at the boys throwing rocks inside the little shop.

  Mama’s bakery was just inside the Quarter, away from the fine businesses rich white ladies shopped in. There weren’t customers coming in to nibble on Mama’s cookies and breads during the day, but she had a bargain with the hairdressers in the Quarter, keeping them and those rich lady types in sweets they pretended they didn’t eat while they got their hair set and the fingernails painted and trimmed.

  �
�I’m moving right now, Mama.”

  But brownies and cookies and rich little cakes weren’t the only things my mama cooked up in that tiny kitchen just big enough for her and, if they were really busy, just the right side of Lulu’s thin body.

  “You stay to the tree line and keep out of Ripper’s sight.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I will.”

  She’d pulled one of Lulu’s old scarves from the drawer in the back of the broom closet and tied two bottles of her ‘special’ hooch together. These bottles were of a stronger vintage, meant to give someone ailing a little relief, not get nobody drunk for fun. She put the bottles at the bottom of the basket and fitted a thin piece of pine on top, filling up the rest of the basket with some bread and corn biscuits and lots of pralines wrapped in wax paper before handing it to me. “Disguise,” she called it, a while back when the policemen started messing with me and my brother Sylv just to see what we carried past the Square and through the crowds of farmers and performers and ladies whose business mama wouldn’t talk about. Mama was good at tricking those white men and I was glad for it. It was too hot to go running away from them if they got too nosy over what I carried in that basket.

  Congo Square was more crowded than it had been all summer. The street performers danced and sang louder and longer than they had the days before and I guessed that was because of the busload of Yankees in from up north somewhere that I heard Lulu telling Mama about while they poured the ready-hooch into clean bottles this morning.

  “Yankees from Boston,” Lulu had said, drawing out the last work like it pained her. Lulu had met a man from New Jersey once, broke her heart clean in two and I reckoned Jersey was just too damn close to Boston for Lulu’s liking.

  The crowd was heavy with curious white folks—all manner of rich people, the women in their fine, fitted dropped waist dresses and sweet little T-strapped patent leather shoes; the men in straw hats they waved in front their faces, complaining like a preacher in the middle of Mardi Gras about the heat and humidity and smell of the city.

  But I didn’t give them much more than a passing glance. Mrs. Matthews had the cancer and it was only the tonic Mama worked from the hooch that seemed to give the old woman enough sleep that she didn’t keep her daughter and grandkids up at all hours. The white Yankees would probably still be nosing around by the time I got back and so I hurried through the crowd, ignoring the sharp eyes that belonged to Ripper’s crowd. They were just as curious as the Yankees and I liked my behind the color it was right then. Didn’t need my mama changing that color because I’d caught those bad seed boys’ eyes.

  “Sookie. Hold up.” Sylv was slow as maple syrup in an ice storm and I figured, as I moved away from the Square toward Tremé that my brother was only catching up to me because Mama had fussed him good. “Damn, girl, you hear me say hold up?”

  “Don’t need a tagalong, Sylv.”

  He caught up to me even though I moved along quicker, spotting Mrs. Matthew’s granddaughter, Bobby, heading up the walk just outside her granny’s small cottage. The girl had gotten taller in the few months it had been since I saw her last, nothing like how she’d looked a year before when I still watched her over night while her granny and mama were off to Baton Rouge to see a specialist.

  “Mama would beat me bloody if I didn’t walk with you.” My brother smelled like sweat, liked he’d been out too late last night and up too early this morning.

  “You shouldn’t have been nosing around Lily Chamber’s house so late last night. That’s why Mama needs to whip you.”

  “Hush, you don’t know what you talking about.”

  “I seen you coming home at two this morning.”

  My brother ignored me, pulling out a half-smoked rolled cigarette from his front pocket. He shrugged, like the frown I gave him didn’t shame him even a little. “Don’t you go sayin nothing to Mama bout me smokin or nothin.”

  “She gonna smell it.”

  “Will not.”

  “Will…hey, Bobby, sugar. How’s your granny?”

  The girl’s small smile fell a little at my question and I felt a little bad for asking. Bobby liked Sylv, I knew that. But my brother was a boy and most boys are too stupid to notice much about how girls act when they’re round them, especially little thirteen-year-old girls like Bobby.

  She didn’t speak much, just kept her attention on the smoke floating out Sylv’s mouth, then the loud, racking coughing fit he had because he was a damn fool who didn’t know nothing about smoking.

  “Mama says to give your granny two tablespoons every couple of hours, but no more than that, you hear?”

  “Yeah. I hear you.” Bobby took the basket when I handed it over, but kept glancing at Sylv, as though she half expected him to do more than lean on the street sign waiting for me to walk back to Rampart with him.

  “We’ll light a candle for her tomorrow night at Mass.” I meant it too. My Bastie wasn’t as old as Mrs. Matthews, but I reckoned she would be one day. It would be nice if someone but me lit a candle for her when she got old and sick.

  Sylv watched me tuck the money Bobby gave me inside the collar of my dress and I pushed him to the side, head shaking when he looked a little too hard, probably from trying to see how many bills had been in that small stack.

  “That ain’t your money.”

  “Yours either. Let me see.”

  My brother reached toward me and I stuck him good with my elbow, making that tall fool wince. “You leave the money be and stop acting a fool and I won’t tell Mama about the cigarettes…”

  He blew out another puff of smoke, flicking ashes right at my feet, trying to make like he didn’t give a fig if Mama knew he smoked. “Or that you left Lily Chamber’s house later than is fittin’ last night.” Sylv watched me close, top lip curling like he was disgusted and I knew I had him. “Ha! You so sad.”

  “Yeah, well, so are you.”

  “Not like you.” He made like he might take another drag of that cigarette, but I beat him to it, yanking it from his mouth before he could stop me, tossing it down and grinding it under my heel. “Why you bothering me?”

  “Your boyfriend is hiding again.”

  That had me stopping, watching my brother as he wiped a handkerchief over his sweaty head. Dempsey. What had he done now? “How you know?”

  “He slept in the tree house last night. Uncle Aron told me this morning.”

  I didn’t have to ask Sylv much more about what Uncle Aron said. Dempsey always ended up in the tree house back of Mimi Bastien’s swamp house when things at his place were bad. Some nights he snuck away from Manchac where his daddy’s land touched up against my granny’s place and bummed a ride to the city because he need to see a friendly face. Least that’s what the fool always said. We all did our part to watch over Dempsey because his own people wouldn’t. Sometimes he hid for days and days inside Mama’s tiny shop. Sometimes Uncle Aron got him a room at the brothel over on Bourbon because the woman running the place was sweet on Aron. They liked his light eyes, they said, how they looked almost green.

  “Bad this time?”

  Sylv shook his head, nodding toward the end of the street like he wanted to get out of the sun. “Aron said it looked like a split lip and a nice shiner on his eye.”

  “Damn his daddy.”

  My brother agreed, nodding once like he had every other time Dempsey ran away from the fine house his mama and daddy lived in with him and his hateful brother Malcolm. His mama especially hated that Dempsey liked sleeping in the tree house or on a cot in Bastie’s pantry instead of their fancy place with the big columns and wrap around porches.

  “You throwing something around in your head. I can see the gears working extra hard.”

  It was just like Sylv to have thoughts that he ought not let out his mouth, but my brother, pain in the backside that he was, had a heart. It wasn’t completely wrecked just yet by the city and what it was having no daddy to speak of and a mama who worked so hard sometimes we went days without se
eing her. Right down to his marrow, my big brother cared a whole lot about his folk and loud coonass boy or not, Dempsey was our folk.

  “That man, Dempsey’s daddy?” Sylv said. I stared right back at him, not bothering to answer the fool because he knew I knew who Dempsey’s daddy was. Everybody on the Manchac did. Mr. Simoneaux could scare the devil and have him running off with his tail wound around his pitchfork. But Sylv would have his say no matter that he probably wasn’t saying nothing I didn’t already know. “Everybody knows there ain’t a drop of good in him.”

  “That ain’t a secret.”

  “So, little sister, what I’m saying to you is that you might wanna be careful.”

  He didn’t like the look I gave him or the way I shook my head like he made no damn sense to me at all. But Sylv wouldn’t let things lie. Not there, not, I guessed, when it came to Dempsey Simoneaux and his hell-bound daddy.

  “Listen to me a little bit.” He took my arm, tugging me near a big magnolia tree with fat, sweet-scented blossoms peppered on every other limb. There were small gnats flying above our heads and I swatted at them, mainly to encourage my brother to get on with his lecture. “This mess with you and that white boy, wasn’t nothing to it when we was all little.”

  “Don’t start with that stuff again.”

  Sylv’s grip on my arm got tight and I stood up straighter, giving him a mean frown as a warning. He stared a little bit before he dropped my arm, shoulders lowering because he knew he couldn’t boss me. “I’m not sayin you need to steer clear of him, Sookie, God knows that boy needs somebody to keep him alive.”

  “But?” The frown stuck and I added a slow arm cross to keep the warning between us.

  “Lord, girl, you smarter than this.” Sylv rubbed his damp face again, tamping off the sweat that had collected against the back of his neck. “Dempsey’s good people, we all know that, but his daddy and that no-account brother of his, ain’t. It’s one thing with him nosing around the tree house or tagging after us when Aron needs a hand delivering the hooch, but Sookie, you ain’t little anymore and neither is he.”